A child care bill 18 years in the making passed the Senate on Thursday in a vote that lawmakers hope is a symbol of more compromise and collaboration to come.

Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) painstakingly crafted the update to the child care law over the course of two years, and in recent weeks, the senators — along with Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) — have held it up as a return to regular order in a bitterly divided Senate.

“Today will be a big victory for America’s children, and I think it’s a great victory for the Senate,” Mikulski said. “This is the way the Senate should be.”

Alexander praised other members of the chamber for showing “restraint and courtesy” as the bill moved through the amendment process. “We won’t be able to do this every time,” but it’s a step, Alexander said.

“We want to change the tone so we can change the tide,” Burr said earlier this week. This desire to bring regular order to the Senate echoed many times over the two days the bill was debated on the floor.

The law, the Child Care and Development Block Grant, helps states provide child care to families of low-income households. The bill that passed Thursday would make a range of updates to the federal child care program, which hadn’t been taken up by the Senate since it was passed in 1996: It would require employers to perform background checks on child care workers for the first time; create a website that allows parents to view local child care services; and place a greater emphasis on the quality of child care — a big priority for advocates.

A t Republican’s bidding, it also would be careful to not overregulate.

“It’s some baseline changes to make sure there’s safe child care,” said Nick Vucic, a senior government affairs associate at Child Care Aware of America, an advocacy group supports the bill.

While some advocates have admitted they would prefer to see the child care program focus more on education and cognitive development for low-income children (rather than just providing day care), they largely threw their weight behind the Senate’s bill in recent months.

House Education & the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (R-Minn.) said in a statement that the Senate passage is “a step forward” and announced his committee will hold a hearing on the child care law on March 25.

Throughout the day Wednesday and Thursday, Burr and Mikulski worked to keep amendments that were controversial or unrelated to the bill from tanking the bipartisan effort. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), for example, withdrew an amendment that would have focused on getting rid of early education programs that overlap, and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) withdrew one that would have required parents to provide their children’s Social Security numbers when signing up for child care.

Some points of tension lingered. Alexander confessed he isn’t a fan of a provision that would require background checks for child care providers for the first time.

“I’m weary of the extent of the background checks here. But I accept the compromises they’ve come to and I think it’s a sound proposal,” Alexander said on the floor, adding that it takes “trust and restraint” to maintain the bipartisanship that the senators were striving for.

Meanwhile, a provision in the bill that would give states some flexibility to get waivers from overlapping requirements tied to different early education funds was cause for concern from Democrats and some advocates.

Ultimately, Democrats didn’t take up the issue on the floor — though Harkin and Mikulski did address the provision, saying that it shouldn’t be used by states to get around Head Start’s stringent standards.

Advocates celebrated the victory and hope there are more to come.

“We think that this shows Congress is heeding and responding to the very strong popular support for early childhood education,” said Catriona Macdonald, policy director for the First Five Years Fund. “We would like to see this continue — there’s more work to be done.”